Laser printers are becoming increasingly popular these days, partly because of their superior print quality. In a laser printer, an image may be produced by direct scanning of a laser beam across the printer's photoreceptor.
Many inkjet printers and dot-matrix printers may simply take an incoming stream of image data and directly imprint it in a slow lurching process that may include pauses as the printer waits for more data. A laser printer may be unable to work this way because the image of an entire page may be needed to output to the printing device in a rapid, continuous process. The scanning of the laser beam over the printer's photoreceptor may not be stopped until an image of an entire page is transferred to the photoreceptor, without creating a visible gap or misalignment of the dots on the printed page.